Monthly Archive

I was in my boss’s office waiting for him to finish cleaning the camera so I could go take some shots of our newest employees. He asked how I was, and I went through with my explanation, and then said something like, “I’m trying not to overthink and just work my way through each week, until…” I trailed off. That thought came out before it had completed itself in my head. Either that, or the “until” was some kind of Freudian slip. At any rate, my boss said, “Until what?”

And I suppose that’s my most recent question. I fumbled my way through another half sentence before starting off with a new thought.

I’ll lay this question here and return back to it when I can allow myself more thinking space.

My cousin goes to Virginia Tech. Since he lives on campus he would have been there during the shooting. He’s alright, but it’s still hard for me to relax. In a way it’s hard for me to comprehend what happened at VT. The shock, the idea is numbing. It’s horrifying. If I show up to my college one of these days and find it hard to be there, I’ll have an inkling as to why.

One of my best friends from my home state was working at the mall when a shooting broke out in the store she was working at. This happened a few months ago. I don’t understand it. Maybe we are all part of some intricate nightmare in someone’s head. Obviously that’s not the case, but it’s a hard thought to get away from when things like what happened at Virginia Tech happen and enter the concious brain.

At any rate, all I can do is pray. And really, there are more people to pray for than just those at Virginia Tech. The house of cards is falling. Who knows what the true effect of this will be. Pray.

It was late at night on a Wednesday. I was driving home and per request of my sister, Sherwood was keeping us company through the speakers. It takes me a good half hour to get home from Applebee’s, and just as I was leaving town I turned a corner and felt my tires slip. It had been snowing (and melting) for the latter part of the evening, but I had no idea that it would accumulate like it did.

It seemed like there was only a thin sheet of snow on the road, but there was enough so that I could not see the lines on the road and had to look hard to see the tracks from the car in front of me. The roads were freezing, and I was far from where I needed to be.

Thankfully there weren’t many people out. The roads going home are (at least for this area) hilly and have lots of twists in them, so, I lived at 25mph. There wasn’t anyone behind me, and considering how bad the weather was I didn’t feel like it was worth risking. Nathan was asleep in the back, and my sister sat quietly next to me, with sparse conversation.

“Do you want me to turn the music off?”
“No, it’s not bothering me.”
“Okay.”

It definitely scared me, but at the time I was letting the chevron alignment signs guide me around the corners, keeping my eyes glued on the road in front of me, soaking in the soundtrack that Sherwood was creating, and I was letting the darkness keep the conversation in the car going.

This morning was damp. I was expecting it to be as frigid as yesterday, but I was pleasantly surprised when the cool air washed over my face. The air was clean and infused with the scent of Winter rain. Light grey clouds hung in a canopy above me, slowly, softly gliding to someplace beyond sight. It’s one of those mornings where once you walk outside, you want to pause, sit silent on the front porch for hours and let the day wake up slow. Almost as if you move you’ll miss something. If you take too many breaths your lungs will be dead to the taste of the morning.

The office was peaceful when I arrived. There were few people, and there is hardly any talking until well after 9:30am. It was almost 11am when I wrote this, so there was white noise of a conversation going on in the front, Nick had his radio playing softly in the next cube over, and Dennis left to go across the street for a meeting. The printer dully roared every few minutes.

It was distracting when I first heard the radio being used. All I knew is that I heard talking and I couldn’t tell where from. But now as Dani California by the Red Hot Chili Peppers floats into my cube, it’s very aesthetically pleasing. (We can forget that I have extremely good sentimental attachments to this song.) I could do without the foot tapping on the plastic floor mat and Nick’s singing-humming, but the radio is on, and as long as it’s on I’m alright.

It seems like the radio (or, music) has been my most frequent company. Even now as my speakers are playing no-name folk singers, in a way it is the friend that has sat beside me this whole way. It’s the person that talks to me to keep the dialogue in my head from getting too loud, the one that helps with headaches, the one to sit with in the dark while driving home, and the one that will be one of the things that helps me get through the rest of this month. One more reason why music is timeless.